Adorabless

Adorabless, a museum of personal belongings made public

Tuesday, May 3, 2016

Irini Karayannopoulou on Wrong Criteria

A new series of drawings and watercolours by Extra-Conjugale is currently on show at the Faye Robertson gallery in Washington D.C. The collaborative duo of Mebastien Sarteau and his anonymous wife strikes again, this time via a number of unholy representations of texts found in all kinds of packaging as well as advertisements, in newspapers and magazines from around the globe.

These texts all have in common a single fact; they are full of mistakes, real, full-length, outrageous, genuine mistakes. Extra-Conjugale are making it clear. ''We are not to be trusted with your errors or faux pas. We intend to illustrate a twisted reality that only exists in the sphere of wrongly spelled texts. Each mistake, a new universe. Our muse is a list of simple mistakes.''

Each mistake is a new world. This simple axiom equally translates into a new drawing each time; the artists are under the secret charm of various mistakes found in wrongly spelled phrases, here and there. Each phrase is a new perception of reality and so are the drawings presented in the exhibition. Each member of Extra-Conjugale corrects the other half's drawing approach. This results to a number of corrected, four hand drawings.

A video is evidence of the research -the process is reminiscent of the school teacher's obsession with hunting the ''moindre'' mistake. As Ruby Jacobson wrote in the preface of her 1970's List of Crimes in Small Cellars poetry collection, ''Take me away Goddess of mispelled irony, I am yours as long as you cannot pronounce me correctly. Please do not let these teachers teach you wrong. I am the mistaken muse and these are my ways''.

A limited edition catalogue of the exhibition is available -Gentle Harmonica Editions, 2016-.
This exhibition was made possible thanks to the kind support of SEBR design studio